Today Veeam announces Veeam Explorer for Active Directory! Veeam Explorer for Active Directory is a valuable and innovative extension for Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam Explorer for Active Directory will allow you to browse the backup of an NTDS.DIT database to locate containers, objects, and their attributes and then restore them to their original location in the running domain controller or to a new location.

In the good old days, like yesterday, Active Directory recovery demanded the downtime associated with restoring the VM that hosted the Active Directory Domain Controller and then using active directory restore mode to recover containers, objects, and their attributes. Unfortunately some attributes such as passwords were problematic or downright impossible to ... Read more

I hope this never happens to you, but if you ever receive a legal discovery request, you may find this post useful. One of my IT friends shared this story of when he had to do an exchange discovery for a set of keyword combinations on historical email communications that he thought might have happened 2 years ago. This kind of discovery would be a real challenge for a lot of IT organizations.

I get this question a lot, so much so that it’s time I blogged it! In particular, if someone has used other backup products which may take different approaches there can be questions on how Veeam gets the job done. While there are a lot of scenarios that Hyper-V can be used and deployed, I thought I’d take the time in this blog post to give a quick breakdown of the sequence of events for a Hyper-V backup job. Let’s break them down into several simple steps.

Hyper-V is cool! Its technically sound and for all practical purposes has become an excellent choice for running infrastructure workloads in a virtual environment. Hyper-V is not just for test and development environments anymore. More and more businesses are relying on Hyper-V to run their production workloads like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Active Directory. Production environments have strict operating requirements! Business relies on uptime and access!

So what if you were using Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 to run your Virtual Machines (VMs) and you have decided to make the move to Windows Server 2012 R2? How will you migrate those VMs? I get this question at least once a week so I decided to write the detailed answer.

For those ... Read more

Some of the best things in an admin’s life are indeed free, especially when it comes to backup and virtualization. Beyond star data-protection solutions and other must-have programs, there are quite a few free, yet no-less-powerful, backup tools out there.

In this article, I will consider Veeam Backup Free Edition, a handy-dandy backup tool for your Hyper-V VMs that will rock your world.

Data consistency is the sum of validity, accuracy, usability and integrity of data between applications and across an operating system. This is a critical characteristic of any backup solution. In this blog, I will discuss data consistency in more detail, define different levels of consistent backups and explain how to make sure that your Veeam backup is consistent.

Today, it’s hard to imagine a situation when data consistency doesn’t matter for a company. It always matters, especially when the data is being changed actively like in bank systems, simultaneously making thousands of financial transactions within an account database.

Over the last few years, virtualization has gained a lot of trust and many decided to virtualize Microsoft Exchange and other I\O intensive business apps. As a result, there have been many questions about the backup and recovery of those apps, including questions about what Veeam has to offer for such circumstances.

A VMware VM is a set of files containing all of the necessary information about a virtualized operating system. These files include the primary configuration file (.VMX), which keeps VM settings, the centralized file for storing information about VM snapshots (.VMSD) and other. The data of the VM is contained in the .VMDK file, the VMware virtual disk format. By way of analogy with physical servers, each VMware VM can have one or more virtual disks, which mean that your VM can contain several .VMDK files or otherwise said, can contain several “hard drives”.

VMware vMotion is a vSphere feature that allows you to move a running VMware VM from one host to another, with no significant impact on your production environment. VMware vMotion was introduced in 2003 and is now a part of almost all VMware vSphere editions, except for vSphere Essentials Kit, which is designed for small virtual environments.

There are a number of scenarios when VMware vMotion might be helpful, starting with pre-defined hardware maintenance when you need to move your VMs to another ESX(i) host for a short period of time without downtime, and to proactive migration of live VMs away from underperforming servers. If your vSphere licensing includes VMware vMotion, congratulations, you are one lucky virtualization admin! But what should you ... Read more

Working in a team with amazing, passionate and smart people is always fantastic. And working in a team with people that discover and solve real-life IT problems is even better…

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is a free hypervisor from Microsoft that delivers all the functionality of its “big brother” Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. The difference? It’s free (the difference is the way you license the virtual machines on the host) and it comes in the Core version. The Core version has a lot of advantages such as a smaller (attack) footprint, less patching and less resources needed but the downside is that it doesn’t have ... Read more